Andrew Green and Eddie Otchere were teenage ravers who turned early-90s jungle into mutant modernism prose. In his foreword to a reissued edition, Sukhdev Sandhu explains its power, alongside photos from the era by Otchere
Andrew Green and Eddie Otchere – AKA Two Fingas and James T Kirk, whose extraordinary collaborative novel Junglist is reissued this month – came of age at a strange, indeterminate time. It was the early 1990s, post-Thatcher and post-Berlin Wall: a period of fudge and inertia, of recession and housing market collapse, of Britain being forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Greater London Council had been abolished in 1986 and the city still had no mayor. Tourists were in short supply; bombs – the IRA attacked the Baltic Exchange, Bishopsgate, even Downing Street – were not.
Green and Otchere were from council estates south of the Thames in Vauxhall. The MI5 building had yet to go up in the neighbourhood and it was hard to imagine that the US embassy would one day move there. Where they lived, squatters were common. The fires that often broke out would have caused even more devastation than they did if the high-rise walling wasn’t so stuffed with asbestos. Turning 16, the two teenagers, both creative and independently minded, headed across town to Hammersmith and West London College. There they bonded over a shared love of comics, basketball, kung fu movies. Music, too.
The rave culture we as Black kids in south London started to experience in the 90s began four years earlier with those white kids. We saw how much fun they were having and brought it into our own circles. By just dancing together, by mimicking each other’s body movements, by being under the same roof, listening to the same music, feeling the same high, taking the same pills: in that magic moment the moodiness was gone.
Continue reading...by Sukhdev Sandhu via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment